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Law360 (January 27, 2021, 9:59 PM EST ) Sanofi SA said Wednesday it has reached an agreement to manufacture more than 125 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine that German drugmaker BioNTech developed with Pfizer Inc.
Paris-based Sanofi says it will open its production facilities in Frankfurt this summer for BioNTech to make the vaccine for patients in Europe. It is, however, still working on its own vaccine with U.K.-based GlaxoSmithKline PLC, announcing last month that low immune response reports had potentially delayed public availability until the fourth quarter of 2021.
"We are very conscious that the earlier vaccine doses are available, the more lives can potentially be saved," Sanofi CEO Paul Hudson said in a statement on Wednesday. Hudson announced the deal the previous night in an interview with French newspaper Le Figaro.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Sanofi, nonetheless, averred that it hopes its facilities will eventually be manufacturing its own competing vaccine, a project that the French pharmaceutical giant said it is not abandoning.
"Our top priority is to focus our efforts and capabilities on fighting this global pandemic. First and foremost, we will do this by continuing to develop our own COVID-19 vaccine candidates, in parallel with this industrial cooperation," Hudson added.
Sanofi currently has two vaccine candidates in the midst of phase two trials. One is a recombinant protein-based vaccine that the company is developing with GlaxoSmithKline, which uses the same technology as one of Sanofi's seasonal influenza vaccines. The other is a messenger RNA vaccine that Sanofi is developing with the Massachusetts-based therapeutics company Translate Bio.
Sanofi says that it won't submit either vaccine for emergency use authorization until they pass a phase three trial. The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine that Sanofi says it has agreed to bottle near BioNTech's international headquarters in Mainz, Germany, is also a messenger RNA vaccine and was first approved in the U.K. on Dec. 2 and in the U.S. and E.U. later that month.
The news comes the same week that nonprofit Pasteur Institute, another Parisian company involved in developing a COVID-19 vaccine candidate, announced that it would be abandoning one of its own efforts with the Merck Group following inferior immune responses in early trials, according to a press release.
Representatives for Sanofi and BioNTech did not respond Wednesday to a request for comment.
--Editing by Regan Estes.
For a reprint of this article, please contact reprints@law360.com.
